Speaker 1: This is Steve Fishman from Orbit Media and I want
Speaker 1: to introduce you to our new series, The Burden Bad Cops,
Speaker 1: produced by BBC. It's a series I really love and
Speaker 1: we're proud to re release it as part of our
Speaker 1: anthology of great true crime series. One thing I really
Speaker 1: value in podcasts is journalistic excellence and as a BBC specialty,
Speaker 1: Jessica Lusenhopp is the host reporter who spent three years
Speaker 1: on this story, and it shows all the characters talk,
Speaker 1: secrets are revealed, even the villain speaks to her. You
Speaker 1: won't believe what he says. The Burden Bad Cops takes
Speaker 1: us into another world, a very frightening one, a world
Speaker 1: where you can't tell the protectors from the predators. A
Speaker 1: quick reminder, all episodes are available now with a subscription.
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Speaker 2: Mister Gondo, are you formerly a Baltimore Police Department detective? Yes,
Speaker 2: that's correct, and are you a defendant in this case?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 2: What have you played guilty?
Speaker 4: Now to a shocking corruption scandal in Baltimore. Seven police
Speaker 4: officers indicted on federal charges accused.
Speaker 2: Now, these real life officers have been charged with abusing
Speaker 2: their badges of being corrupt to the core. And why
Speaker 2: did you plead guilty?
Speaker 4: Because I'm guilty?
Speaker 2: What are you charged with in this case? Charge with
Speaker 2: a racketeering conspiracy which consists of roubis, citizens, falsified document.
Speaker 5: One sergeant, and six detectives, all at some point assigned
Speaker 5: to the department. It's Gun Trace Task Force, aren't handcuffs?
Speaker 2: And when did you rob people? When did you rob
Speaker 2: citizens working? And what did you steal from them?
Speaker 1: Money?
Speaker 2: Did you also steal drugs? Yes? And what did you
Speaker 2: do with the drugs that you stole from people?
Speaker 6: Sold them?
Speaker 2: And what did you do with the money you stole
Speaker 2: from people? Gipt it?
Speaker 4: The indictment reads like the script for a gangster film.
Speaker 4: A lot of people say this that this case sounds
Speaker 4: more like the plot of a movie, but it all
Speaker 4: really happens. At the heart of this scandal is a
Speaker 4: small unit of plain clothes police, the Gun Trace Task Force.
Speaker 4: Their job to make the city of Baltimore a safer
Speaker 4: place by getting illegal guns off the street. Instead, they
Speaker 4: acted like a criminal gang, operating in the shadows, mostly
Speaker 4: in poor black neighborhoods. They robbed residents, broke into houses,
Speaker 4: stole drugs, and planted evidence. They were both cops and robbers,
Speaker 4: and they'd been doing it for years. The fallout is huge.
Speaker 4: Hundreds of criminal cases dropped and thousands are now under review.
Speaker 4: So how did this happen? That's what I've been trying
Speaker 4: to figure out. I'm Jessica Lesson Hop and this is
Speaker 4: bad Cops from the BBC World Service, The True Story
Speaker 4: of Baltimore's Gun Trace Task Force, Part one. The Tracker
Speaker 4: Baltimore is as much a character as any other in
Speaker 4: this story. It's an old city, a seaport city, famous
Speaker 4: for crabs, for a style of music called Baltimore Club,
Speaker 4: and yes, famous for the TV show The Wire. It's
Speaker 4: blocks of row houses and brick buildings made from the
Speaker 4: clay that the city was built on. It's a place
Speaker 4: that loves street parties and cookouts at stop lights. Kids
Speaker 4: run up to your car and wash your windshield for tips.
Speaker 4: You can still buy fruit from horse drawn carts in
Speaker 4: the street. It sounds cheesy, but some of the prettiest
Speaker 4: sunsets I've ever seen have been in Baltimore. It's also
Speaker 4: a city with another side. Old racist laws carved Baltimore
Speaker 4: into segregated newsighborhoods. Job losses and white flight left a
Speaker 4: lot of those beautiful row homes boarded up. Drugs devastated communities,
Speaker 4: and then the War on Drugs emptied those neighborhoods and
Speaker 4: filled prisons. Guns are everywhere and in amongst all of that.
Speaker 4: Most people are just trying to get by. But minding
Speaker 4: your own business is no guarantee that you'll be safe.
Speaker 5: My name's I'm Kenneth Bumgardner live in Baltimore, Maryland.
Speaker 4: Kenneth is in his early forties. He's a family guy.
Speaker 5: I have a wife, two daughters, three step kids, four grandkids.
Speaker 4: He does general maintenance for a property management company.
Speaker 5: I do apartment checks, fixing like refrigerators, dishwashers, make sure
Speaker 5: people got hot water, cleaning out, taking a trash out,
Speaker 5: just basically maintenance, you know.
Speaker 4: In early twenty sixteen, Kenneth rents a brand new BMW.
Speaker 4: It's a surprise for his Sun's birthday, and on this
Speaker 4: particular evening, he's feeling good cruising behind the wheel of
Speaker 4: this flashy ride. In his jacket pocket. He's got a
Speaker 4: month's rent money, plus the extra that he still owes
Speaker 4: his landlord.
Speaker 5: I was riding through like my old neighborhood. For the
Speaker 5: next thing I know, I see two cars pulling on me,
Speaker 5: all black, and guys jump out.
Speaker 4: It's dark. Kenneth thinks he's about to be robbed, and
Speaker 4: he's not about to hang around to find out.
Speaker 5: He sings up with my car and reversed and went
Speaker 5: to hit the gas. They start ramming my car back with.
Speaker 4: His vehicles forced back up onto the car. He's stuck.
Speaker 5: My adrenaline was pumping a hundred mile now, you know,
Speaker 5: like I was scared for my life, you know, like
Speaker 5: I didn't know what was going to happen or who
Speaker 5: he was. And I jumped out of the car.
Speaker 4: Right and he only manages to get a few feet and.
Speaker 5: Then everything went black, completely black. That was out, lights
Speaker 5: was out, and I was out. You know.
Speaker 4: Kenneth is left lying on the street. When he finally
Speaker 4: comes to, he feels in his jacket pocket for his rent.
Speaker 5: Money, got checked it and it was gone.
Speaker 4: He's been robbed and he's badly hurt, but He somehow
Speaker 4: makes it back home and passes out.
Speaker 5: The next morning, I woke up and my wife was like,
Speaker 5: I think you need to go to the hospital. And
Speaker 5: when I got to the hospital, he was like, yeah, well,
Speaker 5: your jar is completely fractured. The next day I came
Speaker 5: back in for the opera and he wired my jaws shut.
Speaker 4: Kenneth's teeth are in pieces and his jaw stay's wired
Speaker 4: shut for the next five months. He loses fifty pounds,
Speaker 4: only can have a meal replacement shakes, and pretty soon
Speaker 4: he's sick of them.
Speaker 5: I was desperate, man, I wanted some fast, fool bad.
Speaker 4: He goes to the closest place and orders a double
Speaker 4: cheeseburger with fries. Back home, he sticks it all in
Speaker 4: a blender.
Speaker 5: I blended it all up and I tried to suck
Speaker 5: it through a store through one of the little gaps
Speaker 5: in my teeth, and I wound up choking on it.
Speaker 5: And he choked me so bad that my wife had
Speaker 5: to get a picture of water and pour it down
Speaker 5: my mouth to stop it from choking, because it almost
Speaker 5: killed me.
Speaker 4: Because his money's been stolen, he can't pay his landlord.
Speaker 4: Kenneth and his family get evicted the car rental company
Speaker 4: sends a bill for sixty seven thousand dollars for the
Speaker 4: smash BMW.
Speaker 5: Yes this lot. They actually had to take it out
Speaker 5: of my check every month. I'll be paying the rest
Speaker 5: of my life.
Speaker 4: Maybe that's what it can be like. In parts of Baltimore.
Speaker 4: People live right on the edge. A single misfortune can
Speaker 4: send your whole life off course. But there's more to
Speaker 4: Kenne's story than meets the eye. Baltimoreans are tired of
Speaker 4: being defined by this kind of violence, and they say
Speaker 4: that the reality is they're caught between two sides, the
Speaker 4: criminals and the police. In twenty fifteen, twenty five year
Speaker 4: old Freddy Gray is chased and arrested by a group
Speaker 4: of cops. Bystanders film on their phones as three officers
Speaker 4: lift him off the ground in handcuffs. A word of warning.
Speaker 4: I've seen this video many times and the audio is
Speaker 4: really hard to listen to. His legs are limp as
Speaker 4: the cops drag him towards the back of a police fan.
Speaker 4: A week later, Gray dies in hospital from a spinal
Speaker 4: cord injury. It's as if he dove headfirst into shallow water.
Speaker 4: There's speculation that he'd been taken on a rough ride.
Speaker 4: It's where police purposely drive crazy to throw the passenger
Speaker 4: in the back around bang him up for being mouthy
Speaker 4: or uncooperative. In the back of that police fan, Gray's
Speaker 4: hands and feet were shackled and he wasn't wearing a seatbelt.
Speaker 4: After his death, thousands take to the streets. It's mostly peaceful,
Speaker 4: but on the day of his funeral, things turn very ugly.
Speaker 4: Fighting breaks out, bricks start flying, glass bottles, It's pure chaos. Looting,
Speaker 4: fires and violence spread across the city. A state of
Speaker 4: emergency is declared. Even the President weighs in.
Speaker 7: What I think the people of Baltimore want more than
Speaker 7: anything else, is the truth.
Speaker 8: That's what people around the country expect.
Speaker 4: Gray's death is declared a homicide.
Speaker 2: Six officers are under arrest tonight on criminal charges.
Speaker 7: This evening, Gray's family called this a first step toward justice.
Speaker 4: I remember thinking this felt like a huge deal at
Speaker 4: the time. People were dancing in the streets for Baltimoreans
Speaker 4: who complained for years about death in police custody, rough rides, assaults.
Speaker 4: Maybe things would be different this time. The city's mayor
Speaker 4: promises the police will be held accountable.
Speaker 8: To those of you who wish to engage in brutality, misconduct, racism,
Speaker 8: and corruption. Let me be clear, there is no place
Speaker 8: in the Baltimore City Police Department for you.
Speaker 4: But that optimism soon fades, either out of fear or
Speaker 4: in protest. The police pull back arrests. Plummet twenty fifteen
Speaker 4: will end up one of the deadliest in the city's history,
Speaker 4: three hundred and forty two homicides, the third highest on record.
Speaker 4: None of the officers in the Freddie Grey case will
Speaker 4: be convicted, and those promises of reform will soon feel
Speaker 4: distant and improbable. For one officer on duty that day,
Speaker 4: the protests even present an opportunity Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, Golden
Speaker 4: Boy of the Baltimore Police Department. During the violence, he
Speaker 4: commandeers a van and drives it through a crowd to
Speaker 4: rescue injured officers. For that, he's awarded the Bronze Star
Speaker 4: for Bravery, and the following year, his bosses give Jenkins
Speaker 4: command of an elite unit of cops, the Gun Trace
Speaker 4: Task Force.
Speaker 7: I'm Sergeant Wayne's a gun Trace passworce Baltimore.
Speaker 1: City place apart.
Speaker 7: I'm Sergeant Wayne, Thanks pass on Trace Task Force.
Speaker 4: The Task Force are super cops. They get results. While
Speaker 4: other cops might recover an illegal gun once a week
Speaker 4: or every two weeks, these guys are bringing in three,
Speaker 4: sometimes four guns in a single night.
Speaker 2: Hold on, hold on, hold on, thinking it out, thinking out.
Speaker 5: Up.
Speaker 7: Take a picture of it.
Speaker 4: Here's Jenkins leading his task force team in a bust.
Speaker 4: They've found bundles of cash stashed in a drug dealer's basement.
Speaker 7: Nobody touches you are saying me right now, how much
Speaker 7: you take it is, Keep your caring on. Don't touch it,
Speaker 7: stay next to it. We're calling out of the fence.
Speaker 7: Don't touch it, keep recording. No one such in his money.
Speaker 4: It's bus like this that make the city bosses look
Speaker 4: good for now at least. But while Jenkins and his
Speaker 4: task force are out on the street tackling illegal guns,
Speaker 4: there's another deadly threat rippling through Baltimore. The opioid crisis.
Speaker 4: Dealers have flooded the city with heroin and it's killing
Speaker 4: a lot of people. The cops are trying to fight back.
Speaker 4: One of those cops is Detective David McDougall from the
Speaker 4: neighboring Hartford County s Year's Office.
Speaker 3: I've been doing drug investigations like this most of my career.
Speaker 3: So I'm just used to sitting in a car. I'm
Speaker 3: comfortable sitting in a car. That's what I do almost
Speaker 3: every day.
Speaker 4: McDougall does a lot of surveillance from his vehicle, trying
Speaker 4: to trace the source of the heroine.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's stressful at times when you're sitting in one
Speaker 3: place for a long time and you're the one that
Speaker 3: can't miss this, like one thing happening. So you're watching, watching,
Speaker 3: watching like I can't you get almost like you can't
Speaker 3: look away because it give me that split second where
Speaker 3: it happens. Whatever it is that you're watching for.
Speaker 4: Tell us some of your tricks of the trade.
Speaker 3: The key is always have enough food. You know, you
Speaker 3: can be in your car for more than a day,
Speaker 3: so that in peat bottles. Make sure you have pea bottles.
Speaker 3: That's that's definitely a key because there's often times where
Speaker 3: you can't get out of the car and you know
Speaker 3: you gotta do what you gotta do.
Speaker 4: When he's not in his car, McDougall is looking through
Speaker 4: the phones of overdose victims to see who they were
Speaker 4: lasting time with. He's checking the texts or calls for
Speaker 4: the names of dealers, and there's this one name that
Speaker 4: keeps popping up over and over, Aaron Anderson. Anderson is
Speaker 4: a pretty big heroin dealer. He runs his operation from
Speaker 4: the parking lot of a shopping center in northeast Baltimore.
Speaker 3: I started doing lengthy surveillances and following him, trying to
Speaker 3: piece together his organization. It would sell large amounts, hundreds
Speaker 3: of grams, and then it would sell small amounts, one
Speaker 3: gram or half gram. They utilize different vehicles and kind
Speaker 3: of did a lot of sales on.
Speaker 6: The move, window the window, car to car.
Speaker 4: McDougall's rattled by how brazen this all is. The dealers
Speaker 4: operating in plain sight, even in front of the cops.
Speaker 3: There's Mark patrol cars driving through the area, and these
Speaker 3: guys are openly dealing drugs and for days, the same
Speaker 3: thing every day, and nobody else seem to care.
Speaker 6: I'm like, I just don't understand this.
Speaker 4: It's almost as if Anderson's being protected somehow.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 4: Ten years on the force, Detective McDougall's never seen anything
Speaker 4: quite like this. He's shaken, but he continues watching the
Speaker 4: dealer and collecting evidence. When he gets worried about being spotted,
Speaker 4: he puts a GPS tracker on Anderson's car. This way
Speaker 4: he can follow him from a distance. Finally, McDougall thinks
Speaker 4: he's got enough to take Anderson down. His plan is
Speaker 4: to arrest the dealer at his apartment, and he's just
Speaker 4: about to do that, but then.
Speaker 6: His pattern changes. He stops going.
Speaker 4: The tracker he's put on Anderson's car shows that at
Speaker 4: the end of every day, Anderson is winding up someplace else.
Speaker 4: McDougall follows the signal and it leads him to a
Speaker 4: Red Roof Inn. It's a two star motel perched on
Speaker 4: a busy intersection a short drive north of the city.
Speaker 4: I've read the online reviews and well, they're a little mixed.
Speaker 4: They do love pets, though, and it's cheap and anonymous,
Speaker 4: the perfect place to hide out. The Red Roof Inn
Speaker 4: is a three story building with a pitched roof. The
Speaker 4: doors on the second and third floors open onto a
Speaker 4: long balcony that wraps around the building. Detective McDougall is
Speaker 4: hunched down in its truck, staring up at room two
Speaker 4: zero seven on the second floor. He and his team
Speaker 4: are waiting for that door to open. When Anderson and
Speaker 4: his girlfriend finally step out, the cops surround them and
Speaker 4: place them under arrest. Still, McDougall's curious, why has Anderson
Speaker 4: been staying in this motel.
Speaker 3: That's one of the first questions I asked him, and
Speaker 3: he told me about the home invasion.
Speaker 4: The home invasion a week earlier, Anderson was out of town.
Speaker 4: His girlfriend was home alone. Two men in mass kicked
Speaker 4: down the front door and threatened her with a gun.
Speaker 4: They made off with jewelry and cash. When Anderson returned,
Speaker 4: his girlfriend told him what happened, and the couple were scared.
Speaker 4: They didn't know if the Mass men would be back,
Speaker 4: so they decided to hide out in the red roof
Speaker 4: in It's not unusual for rival dealers to rob one another,
Speaker 4: and for the moment, McDougall doesn't think much of it,
Speaker 4: but it's the first clue that something's not quite right.
Speaker 4: The next clue comes just moments later, as they're preparing
Speaker 4: to drive Anderson off to jail. One of McDougall's men
Speaker 4: is under the dealer's car, removing the tracker they've been
Speaker 4: using to tail him, and he calls McDougall over.
Speaker 3: He then asked me if we had two trackers on
Speaker 3: the car, and I thought him no.
Speaker 6: When he pulls it off and shows me the second.
Speaker 4: Tracker, They've found another tracker under Anderson's car. McDougall's standing
Speaker 4: there with this GPS device in his hand. Is it
Speaker 4: one of theirs? He doesn't recognize it. He asked the
Speaker 4: rest of his team if they do.
Speaker 3: And nobody did, so I was kind of upset because
Speaker 3: I'm thinking somebody else was on my guy and didn't
Speaker 3: tell me.
Speaker 4: McDougall's checked already, and no one else is supposed to
Speaker 4: be investing aiding Anderson, so who else has been on
Speaker 4: his tail? It's way too weird to let go. He
Speaker 4: contacts the tracker company to find out who owns this thing,
Speaker 4: and the next day he's got a name, but it's
Speaker 4: not a name he recognizes. He runs it through the
Speaker 4: system to see if the guy's got a record. Dozens
Speaker 4: of results come back, but it's not because the guy's
Speaker 4: got a long rap sheet. He's never been arrested. Instead,
Speaker 4: he's the one doing the arresting because the owner of
Speaker 4: that mystery tracker, he's a cop.
Speaker 6: A Baltimore City Police officer.
Speaker 4: McDougall starts spinning all kinds of theories. Could this officer
Speaker 4: be involved in some kind of secret investigation that's been
Speaker 4: kept off the books? You know, cops cut corners sometimes.
Speaker 4: But then McDougall discovers that this guy's paid for the
Speaker 4: tracker himself with his own credit card.
Speaker 3: There's no way that a police officer is going to
Speaker 3: pay for his own tracker.
Speaker 6: That really wasn't adding up.
Speaker 4: McDougall's struggling to make any sense of this. Why would
Speaker 4: a Baltimore cop by one of these things for himself?
Speaker 4: And then he has a darker thought.
Speaker 3: At the time the home invasion happened, Anderson's far away
Speaker 3: from his apartment. That is a great time to try
Speaker 3: to steal his drugs and money because he's not there.
Speaker 3: What if a police officer put the tracker on Anderson's
Speaker 3: car to track his movements to conduct the home invasion?
Speaker 4: A cop robbing a dealer.
Speaker 3: It sounded crazy as I was saying it, But I
Speaker 3: was saying it, I could look around and see people looking.
Speaker 6: At me, like, come on, man.
Speaker 4: What McDougall doesn't know yet is that he's tugged on
Speaker 4: a thread. It's a thread that will unravel a web
Speaker 4: of corruption right at the heart of the Baltimore Police Department.
Speaker 4: Because that cop, he's no ordinary cop. He's one of
Speaker 4: the Golden Boys from the Gun Trace Task Force. And
Speaker 4: maybe they're not quite as golden as everybody thinks. That's
Speaker 4: next time You've been listening to Bad Cops from the
Speaker 4: BBC World Service with me Jessica lessen Hoop. The program
Speaker 4: was mixed by Neil Churchill, additional mixing by James Beard.
Speaker 4: The producer is Ben Crichton and the editor is Richard Varden.
Speaker 1: If you're enjoying Bad Cops, make sure to check out
Speaker 1: in One of the Burden, you'll meet the greatest detective
Speaker 1: in Brooklyn history. He takes on the worst criminals until
Speaker 1: one day the criminals take him on.